People | Passion | Platforms

Productivity

… no not the final frontier, but rather an acronym that I developed for my last company. It was designed as a ‘guiding light’ for all staff as they went through their day to day business. Thought you might find it useful.

Speed – move quickly, time is of the essence.

Process – it’s there for a reason. use it. improve it if you can. funnel the mods back into the system.

Accountability – say what you are going to do, do what you said you’d do. don’t point fingers. be responsible.

9 Draft Posts sitting on this site waiting for me to finish them and release them into the wild world.

9 entries sitting in my blog catalogue from yesterday – while I work out if they will make it into my Blog Post Ideas file.

21 Blog Post ideas already sitting in myBlog Post Ideas file, while I decide if there is value I can add to the story, or if it is interesting enough just to release as a ‘well now – there’s interesting’ kind of post.

The more I get behind, the more impressed I am by the writers who not only keep their posting rate going at the rate they do, but with the level of quality that they achieve. Impressive.

Meanwhile – I used The Rant as a framework when I first arrived at Lyris, calling out the Bezos mandate – highlighted below. Somehow we didn’t quite have the same success! But I still think it was right – and powerful. So I have reposted.

If you track my thoughts, you will know that I am a big believer in ‘breaking down the silos’. I mean REALLY break – not pay lip service to it – through the introduction of ‘account managers, single point of contacts etc .. the fact is that these are just veneers to hide the real issues that enterprises have. Mid level management protecting their jobs, fiefdoms – even ’empires’ to try to hold on to what they consider is ‘there’s.

Seems like Andrew Spittle a ‘Happiness Engineer’ at Automattic agrees …. though he is coming from a different angle – my bold in the quote below.

This whole trend of customer success is a tired repetition of customer support as an entry-level-dead-end job that people simply seek to move out of. Customer support, when done well, is a career. Every conversation, whether it’s reactive or proactive, is an oppotunity to learn from your customers. That is immensely valuable no matter your departmental definition. Every time you try to isolate certain elements into a single department and declare that proactive support won’t, and cannot, work with customer support you do the broader community harm. Every one of us is in this to help people succeed.

Ben Evan’s writing about the eternal conflict between getting the balance right between ‘here’s everything’ and “here’s a few we think works”. Answer ? It’s tough.

Looking at these companies, it strikes me that actually, saying that ‘Yahoo’s directory didn’t scale’ misses the point. What we’re really seeing is a trade-off between two problems. You can have a list, solving discovery and recommendation, but once the domain gets big then your list is either unusably long or partial and incomplete (and perhaps uneconomic to maintain). Or you can have a searchable index of everything but you’re on your own working what’s good and finding things you didn’t know to search for. Time Out is an interesting attempt to sit in the middle of that scale – enough coverage to be quasi-universal, and to promise something good nearby wherever you are, but also enough curation that you don’t just get 5,000 listings all with five stars. ProductHunt is an attempt to use community to surface quality at scale, as is Pinterest (both are a16z investments). In contrast, Canopy uses hand-curated selections on Amazon. The question for all of these: do you filter crowdsourcing down enough to get quality, or scale up editorial to get coverage, or you give up on coverage and do a purely curated product?